March 26, 2018

The Door Keeps Swinging

Left over from last week’s news about the administration of Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) is the swinging door of federal employees and DDT’s legal team.

In 1946, Eleanor Roosevelt was instrumental in creating the UN created the Commission on the Status of Women in 1946 to promote gender quality and the empowerment of women. DDT thinks so little of women that he sent Bethany Kozma, a self-described stay-at-home mom,” as the U.S. representative for the 82nd meeting of CSW. She has described the UN as a “pro-life nation” and called trans children “gender confused” in her battle to keep them from using bathrooms matching their gender identity by claiming that it leaves students open to “sexual assault or rape.”

According to DDT’s friend Christopher Ruddy, DDT thinks that the White House is operating “like a smooth machine” and has been “perplexed” by news reports of chaos. DDT claims to be keeping Chief of Staff John Kelly and HUD secretary Ben Carson, what he usually says soon before he gets someone to fire them. On vacation in Florida, DDT continues to attack fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson by saying that he didn’t have the “brains or energy” for the job.

Emails showing that DDT fires everyone who he considers disloyal to him has caused Democrats on the House Oversight Committee to demand State Department records of internal communications. The agency tried to reassign a staffer after Breitbart and Newt Gingrich complained about her Iranian surname. Independent investigators report that retaliation against career staffers is rampant throughout the government. Because their firings can only be based on merit and work performance, DDT is breaking the law by basing firings on political affiliations or patronage. At the same time Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) director Mick Mulvaney, suggested as a replacement for Chief of Staff John Kelly, has worked to replace existing employees with political appointees that can violate civil service laws.

Employees can appeal their firings to the Merit Systems Protection Board, but the one-member board can’t hear cases until two DDT’s appointees are confirmed. At the beginning of 2018, the backlog, the longest in history, is 750 cases.

Conservative congressional members are pushing bills that would give Cabinet members the right to fire anyone they wish. Rep. Lloyd Smucker’s (R-PA) Labor Department Accountability Act would give them the authority to suspend, involuntarily reassign, demote, or remove employees and senior executives. Rep. Francis Rooney (R-FL) has a similar bill.

The most unpopular appointees in March are Gina Haspel for CIA director and John Bolton for national security adviser. A promoter of torture, Haspel destroyed videos with impunity about CIA torture in a black site that she oversaw because the CIA classifies these torture sessions as formal government meetings and exempt from being preserved. Haspel will also claim that any information about her is “classified,” even if it’s already in the public domain, during confirmation hearings.

Bolton hired Cambridge Analytica in 2014 for “behavioral microtargeting with psychographic messaging” and knew that the material came from harvested Facebook data.

In addition to being a contributor to Fox, Bolton chairs the Gatestone Institute that publishes “fake” news about threats from Islam to Western society. Its anti-Islam vitriol has the sole purpose of establishing bigotry against Muslim immigrants and refugees by spreading racial lies about them that Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz, and DDT repeated during their presidential campaigns. Bolton also wrote the foreward to a book by anti-Islam conspiracy theorists Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller. Gatestone, which has paid $310,000 to Bolton, works to sway elections not only in the U.S. but also in European elections through support of far-right, anti-Muslim candidates on social media.

As George W. Bush’s policymaker on Iran, Bolton actively conspired from 2002 through 2004 to set up conditions for military action and manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that he hoped would start a war on Iran with support from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the militantly Zionist casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

Bolton is behind DDT’s intention to back out of the Iran nuclear deal.

All we can hope is that Bolton’s typical abusive behavior turns toward DDT who can then shop for a fourth national security adviser.

Other disastrous DDT nominees:

Roger Severino, nominee for HHS Office for Civil Rights, says that as the child of Colombian immigrants he understands discrimination on a first-hand basis, but his education doesn’t apply to LGBTQ people. He believes that health care workers should be able to use their personal religious beliefs in determining who gets treatment. Severino has said that marriage quality is “using government power to coerce everyone, including children, into pledging allegiance to a radical new gender ideology” and using the right pronoun for transgender students is was the “equivalent to making them say two plus two equals five.”

Robert Redford, nominee for head of the Centers for Disease Control, has been accused of overstating the therapeutic effects of an experimental AIDS vaccine that led to corrections and having an “inappropriate” relationship with the evangelical Christian group Americans for Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (ASAP), now Children’s AIDS Fund. Founded by the virulently anti-LGBT and anti-abortion activists Shepherd and Anita Smit, the group promotes abstinence as the only proper prevention behavior and opposes the use of condoms. Anita Smith complained about the “power struggle between homosexual white men who abuse all the government AIDS programs fundamentally to fund their subculture and their political activities.” A devout Catholic, Redford wants churches to take over the care of HIV patients. Nobody has a chance to interview Redford, however, because he doesn’t need to be confirmed.

Peter Wright, nominee for the EPA Office of Aland and Emergency Management (OLEM) could protect big companies, like his former employer Dow Chemical, from having to clean up the 1,300 Superfund toxic cleanup sites, one-tenth of them caused by Dow that gave DDT $1 million for his inauguration fund. The money has already paid off because EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt reversed a ban on Dow’s brain-damaging insecticide.

“On our college campuses, your folks are reading the labels, won’t put any sugar in their body, they don’t eat carbs anymore, and they’re very, very fastidious about what goes into their body — and then you buy a street drug for $5 or $10 and it’s laced with fentanyl, and that’s it. So I guess my short advice is, as somebody double your age: eat the ice cream, buy the French fry, don’t buy the street drug.”

About the rumor that VA Secretary David Shulkin is on his way out, DDT denies it—another dangerous sign for employment. A possible replacement is Fox & Friends host Pete Hegsweth.

The scariest thought is that EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt might see his continuing wish fulfilled to replace AG Jeff Sessions.

DDT’s frantic reaction to Robert Mueller’s investigation into his involvement resulted in rapid shifts in his legal team’s membership. Two new DDT hires after team leader John Dowd bailed, Fox contributor Joe diGenova and his wife Virginia Toensing, disappeared in less than a week. A senior official said the couple’s disheveled appearance at their first meeting with DDT caused him to decide that they didn’t belong on his team.

DiGenova is a conspiracy theorist with a lot of baggage who thinks that the FBI and DOJ are framing the president by inventing the Russia scandal to keep DDT from being president. Leader of DDT’s legal team, Dowd quit because DDT didn’t follow his direction to fire Mueller. Not only does DDT not pay attention to his lawyers, but he also has a reputation for not paying them. DDT’s loss of lawyers gives him a team of one—Jay Sekulow—who is little more than a PR person.

The U.S. House of Representatives has an extra Democrat after the GOP candidate in PA-18 admitted defeat to Conor Lamb. The Republicans put over $10 million into the race where DDT won by over 20 points in 2018. Democrats spent less than $3 million. The amateurish GOP ads tried to tie the Democrat to a sheep, reminiscent of the horrible 2010 demon sheep ads, but the Lamb (left) won anyway.

The “Exposed” DDT image is featured on this week’s New Yorker in artist Barry Blitt’s 15th image of the president for the magazine’s covers as he faces the media. Blitt said, “I wanted to address President Trump’s stormy relationship with the press” and called DDT the “gift that keeps on grifting.”